Apple Intelligence’s new notification summary feature could be absurdly wrong

Apple released Apple Intelligence to the general public last month with iOS 18.1. This latest mobile software update brings several new AI features to compatible phone models, such as writing tools to help you proofread your emails and the cleaning tool to remove objects from your photos in seconds.

You might be disappointed to hear that there’s no AI in Siri – that’s coming later (iOS 18.2). And visual intelligence is not there yet either. And to continue with the complaints, there is a certain AI feature on the iPhone that constantly stresses me out or just plain confuses me.

And that’s notification summaries for text messages.

Read more: How to get Apple Intelligence on your iPhone with iOS 18.1

Check this out: Apple’s Monster iPhone Update: How Apple Intelligence Works on iOS 18.1

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I know Apple Intelligence is trying to help, but…

The new notification summary feature on Apple Intelligence uses AI to ‘intelligently’ summarize your notifications so you can quickly skim through the most important details from your busiest apps. And while the feature works quite well for summarizing long emails into concise points, it isn’t always useful with text messages.

Apple Intelligence sometimes takes things too literally.

Recently I received several text messages about how bad a walk was and how that person felt “dead”. (tired) afterwards, along with some other scant details. Here’s how Apple Intelligence summarized those few messages for me:

This is a text about how a trainer “killed” my friend with a particularly tough workout.

Apple Intelligence, and more specifically the notification summaries feature, just doesn’t do well with sarcasm, exaggerations, jokes, and jargon. And that’s a problem, especially when it comes to how informal text messages can be. There is even a subreddit with a lot of terrible summaries of reports that Apple Intelligence folks received. It takes everything at face value, which can lead to some pretty gruesome, incorrect, or just plain annoying text message summaries.

How to disable notification digests for text messages

Rather than stressing every time a disturbing summary pops up, I turned off the notification summaries for text messages. If you want to do the same, it’s simple:

1. Launch the Institutions application
2. Go to Notifications > Summary of examples
3. Switch off To inform

Instead of receiving abbreviated summaries of multiple text messages, you’ll see each individual text message on your lock screen or notification center as usual. You can disable notification overviews completely (disable Summary of examples) for every single app on your phone, but as I mentioned before, it works pretty well for emails and third-party apps.

For now it does one really great work with text messages. Do you see Siri? That’s sarcasm.